You're in a quarterly meeting where everyone is armed with slide decks; some good, some mind numbingly bad. It's your turn, and you have a concise five-slide deck comprised of targeted, well designed, and insightful graphs. The graphs are clear and the room is able to discuss the highs and lows reported in the data.

While you leave the meeting satisfied that you communicated clearly...

The complex data you turned into consumable information was no trivial task

Regardless if it took a few hours or a few days to prepare the slides - it took significant effort.

Taking large volumes of information (sometimes abstract information), and creating something easily digestible can be challenging; both mentally as well as on resources. The information has to first, be collected, then correlated, analyzed, insights identified, and finally, organized in a consumable way. Sometimes, an intimate knowledge of the system is required to make sense of connected components, knowledge that sometimes has to be translated for a non-specialized audience.

Today's log platforms allow you to write complex queries to get information important to your business. However, with traditional tools the query design alone can take days.

Once you have the information, you need to manually normalize CSV or XML results into a format that your visualization engine (either huge spreadsheets or more advanced tools like Graphite) can ingest. Then, when you have the data loaded, you'll have to format the graphs to make sense to your target audience of peers.

The goal of your presentation is to educate the organization

You want to paint a clear picture of what is going on, and what direction to go. There is a chance the results won't go further than the conference room; evaporating your effort, and more importantly the time you could have spent on other tasks.

Other tasks like consuming the data in real-time for the management of applications and systems. Speed is key with these tasks, so the data needs to be presented in a way (if something goes wrong) you can identify issues in a glance and respond quickly by drilling down to find out specific incident details.

Data feeds insights, and insights feed action

Wouldn't it be nice if the intelligence of log analysis fed the visualizations of a charting platform automatically? Your job would be monitoring real-time dashboards of valuable information, picking the best charts, and downloading or screenshotting to build presentations.

It sounds like a pipe dream, but the technology exists

Modern log analysis platforms like Logentries are moving away from the query first, analyze second approach by turning it on its head with automated, effortless insights, and query engines for drill down only. Visualization engines offer unlimited customization with clear visualizations that your team, and the teams around you can understand in a glance.

Hosted Graphite, based on the popular open-source Graphite platform, is a SaaS based service for visualizing key operations and application metrics.

Logentries is a powerful, modern log management and analysis platform that takes log analysis one step further with machine-learning, intelligent tagging and team annotation capabilities. Both these services provide excellent tools to help operations and development teams better understand their application eco-system, and activity.

However, Hosted Graphite's powerful visualizations are lost without strong data. Not just any data, data that has been synthesized into useful insights.

Faster reaction time to key events, and less time spent on trivial activity

Faster and easier communication with your team and others

Avoid being over inclusive by targeted insight driven visualizations

Modern log analysis in existing Graphite environments

Because both platforms are cloud based, set-up occurs in days, not weeks or months. If you are already a Logentries user your visualizations are immediately ready to go, only some bedazzling is required. If you are an existing Hosted Graphite customer, the data you are already feeding the engine will be more valuable, and less time consuming.

If you are new to both, be prepared for how humbling the additional insights will be.

The next time you are in a meeting or working with your team, you can maintain the integrity of the data behind your insights. Knowing that a great product design combined with a powerful integration between two platforms got you there, without a bunch of wasted effort and esteem.

Interested in learning more about the integration with Hosted Graphite? Watch the recorded webinar to learn more.

Trevor Parsons is Chief Scientist and Co-founder of Logentries. Trevor has over 10 years experience in enterprise software and, in particular, has specialized in developing enterprise monitoring and performance tools for distributed systems. He is also a research fellow at the Performance Engineering Lab Research Group and was formerly a Scientist at the IBM Center for Advanced Studies. Trevor holds a PhD from University College Dublin, Ireland.

While some developers care passionately about how data centers and clouds are architected, for most, it is only the end result that matters. To the majority of companies, technology exists to solve a business problem, and only delivers value when it is solving that problem. 2017 brings the mainstream adoption of containers for production workloads.
In his session at 21st Cloud Expo, Ben McCormack, VP of Operations at Evernote, discussed how data centers of the future will be managed, how the public cloud best suits your organization, and what the future holds for operations and infrastructure engineers in a post-container world. Is a serverless world inevitable?

Enterprises are adopting Kubernetes to accelerate the development and the delivery of cloud-native applications. However, sharing a Kubernetes cluster between members of the same team can be challenging. And, sharing clusters across multiple teams is even harder.
Kubernetes offers several constructs to help implement segmentation and isolation. However, these primitives can be complex to understand and apply. As a result, it’s becoming common for enterprises to end up with several clusters. This leads to a waste of cloud resources and increased operational overhead.

SYS-CON Events announced today that Telecom Reseller has been named “Media Sponsor” of SYS-CON's 22nd International Cloud Expo, which will take place on June 5-7, 2018, at the Javits Center in New York, NY.
Telecom Reseller reports on Unified Communications, UCaaS, BPaaS for enterprise and SMBs. They report extensively on both customer premises based solutions such as IP-PBX as well as cloud based and hosted platforms.

SYS-CON Events announced today that CrowdReviews.com has been named “Media Sponsor” of SYS-CON's 22nd International Cloud Expo, which will take place on June 5–7, 2018, at the Javits Center in New York City, NY.
CrowdReviews.com is a transparent online platform for determining which products and services are the best based on the opinion of the crowd. The crowd consists of Internet users that have experienced products and services first-hand and have an interest in letting other potential buyers learn their thoughts on their experience.

"CA has been doing a lot of things in the area of DevOps. Now we have a complete set of tool sets in order to enable customers to go all the way from planning to development to testing down to release into the operations," explained Aruna Ravichandran, Vice President of Global Marketing and Strategy at CA Technologies, in this SYS-CON.tv interview at DevOps Summit at 21st Cloud Expo, held Oct 31 – Nov 2, 2017, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA.

"Infoblox does DNS, DHCP and IP address management for not only enterprise networks but cloud networks as well. Customers are looking for a single platform that can extend not only in their private enterprise environment but private cloud, public cloud, tracking all the IP space and everything that is going on in that environment," explained Steve Salo, Principal Systems Engineer at Infoblox, in this SYS-CON.tv interview at 21st Cloud Expo, held Oct 31 – Nov 2, 2017, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA.

A strange thing is happening along the way to the Internet of Things, namely far too many devices to work with and manage. It has become clear that we'll need much higher efficiency user experiences that can allow us to more easily and scalably work with the thousands of devices that will soon be in each of our lives. Enter the conversational interface revolution, combining bots we can literally talk with, gesture to, and even direct with our thoughts, with embedded artificial intelligence, which can process our conversational commands and orchestrate the outcomes we request across our personal and professional realm of connected devices.

DevOps promotes continuous improvement through a culture of collaboration. But in real terms, how do you: Integrate activities across diverse teams and services? Make objective decisions with system-wide visibility? Use feedback loops to enable learning and improvement?
With technology insights and real-world examples, in his general session at @DevOpsSummit, at 21st Cloud Expo, Andi Mann, Chief Technology Advocate at Splunk, explored how leading organizations use data-driven DevOps to close their feedback loops to drive continuous improvement.

SYS-CON Events announced today that Evatronix will exhibit at SYS-CON's 21st International Cloud Expo®, which will take place on Oct 31 – Nov 2, 2017, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA.
Evatronix SA offers comprehensive solutions in the design and implementation of electronic systems, in CAD / CAM deployment, and also is a designer and manufacturer of advanced 3D scanners for professional applications.

We all know that end users experience the Internet primarily with mobile devices. From an app development perspective, we know that successfully responding to the needs of mobile customers depends on rapid DevOps – failing fast, in short, until the right solution evolves in your customers' relationship to your business. Whether you’re decomposing an SOA monolith, or developing a new application cloud natively, it’s not a question of using microservices – not doing so will be a path to eventual business failure.

"Cloud4U builds software services that help people build DevOps platforms for cloud-based software and using our platform people can draw a picture of the system, network, software," explained Kihyeon Kim, CEO and Head of R&D at Cloud4U, in this SYS-CON.tv interview at 21st Cloud Expo, held Oct 31 – Nov 2, 2017, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA.

Is advanced scheduling in Kubernetes achievable?Yes, however, how do you properly accommodate every real-life scenario that a Kubernetes user might encounter? How do you leverage advanced scheduling techniques to shape and describe each scenario in easy-to-use rules and configurations? In his session at @DevOpsSummit at 21st Cloud Expo, Oleg Chunikhin, CTO at Kublr, answered these questions and demonstrated techniques for implementing advanced scheduling. For example, using spot instances and cost-effective resources on AWS, coupled with the ability to deliver a minimum set of functionalities that cover the majority of needs – without configuration complexity.

As DevOps methodologies expand their reach across the enterprise, organizations face the daunting challenge of adapting related cloud strategies to ensure optimal alignment, from managing complexity to ensuring proper governance. How can culture, automation, legacy apps and even budget be reexamined to enable this ongoing shift within the modern software factory?
In her Day 2 Keynote at @DevOpsSummit at 21st Cloud Expo, Aruna Ravichandran, VP, DevOps Solutions Marketing, CA Technologies, was joined by a panel of industry experts and real-world practitioners who shared their insight into an emerging set of best practices that lie at the heart of today's digital transformation.

SYS-CON Events announced today that Synametrics Technologies will exhibit at SYS-CON's 22nd International Cloud Expo®, which will take place on June 5-7, 2018, at the Javits Center in New York, NY. Synametrics Technologies is a privately held company based in Plainsboro, New Jersey that has been providing solutions for the developer community since 1997. Based on the success of its initial product offerings such as WinSQL, Xeams, SynaMan and Syncrify, Synametrics continues to create and hone innovative products that help customers get more from their computer applications, databases and infrastructure. To date, over one million users around the world have chosen Synametrics solutions to help power their accelerated business and personal computing needs.

As many know, the first generation of Cloud Management Platform (CMP) solutions were designed for managing virtual infrastructure (IaaS) and traditional applications. But that's no longer enough to satisfy evolving and complex business requirements.
In his session at 21st Cloud Expo, Scott Davis, Embotics CTO, explored how next-generation CMPs ensure organizations can manage cloud-native and microservice-based application architectures, while also facilitating agile DevOps methodology. He explained how automation, orchestration and governance are fundamental to managing today's hybrid cloud environments and are critical for digital businesses to deliver services faster, with better user experience and higher quality, all while saving money.

SYS-CON Events announced today that Google Cloud has been named “Keynote Sponsor” of SYS-CON's 21st International Cloud Expo®, which will take place on Oct 31 – Nov 2, 2017, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA. Companies come to Google Cloud to transform their businesses. Google Cloud’s comprehensive portfolio – from infrastructure to apps to devices – helps enterprises innovate faster, scale smarter, stay secure, and do more with data than ever before.

Cloud Expo | DXWorld Expo have announced the conference tracks for Cloud Expo 2018. Cloud Expo will be held June 5-7, 2018, at the Javits Center in New York City, and November 6-8, 2018, at the Santa Clara Convention Center, Santa Clara, CA. Digital Transformation (DX) is a major focus with the introduction of DX Expo within the program. Successful transformation requires a laser focus on being data-driven and on using all the tools available that enable transformation if they plan to survive over the long term. A total of 88% of Fortune 500 companies from a generation ago are now out of business. Only 12% still survive. Similar percentages are found throughout enterprises of all sizes.

Continuous Delivery makes it possible to exploit findings of cognitive psychology and neuroscience to increase the productivity and happiness of our teams.
In his session at 22nd Cloud Expo | DXWorld Expo, Daniel Jones, CTO of EngineerBetter, will answer:
How can we improve willpower and decrease technical debt?
Is the present bias real? How can we turn it to our advantage?
Can you increase a team’s effective IQ?
How do DevOps & Product Teams increase empathy, and what impact does empathy have on productivity?

There is a huge demand for responsive, real-time mobile and web experiences, but current architectural patterns do not easily accommodate applications that respond to events in real time. Common solutions using message queues or HTTP long-polling quickly lead to resiliency, scalability and development velocity challenges. In his session at 21st Cloud Expo, Ryland Degnan, a Senior Software Engineer on the Netflix Edge Platform team, will discuss how by leveraging a reactive stream-based protocol, we have been able to solve many of these problems at the communication layer. This makes it possible to create rich application experiences and support use-cases such as mobile-to-mobile communication and large file transfers that would be difficult or cost-prohibitive with traditional networking.

You know you need the cloud, but you're hesitant to simply dump everything at Amazon since you know that not all workloads are suitable for cloud. You know that you want the kind of ease of use and scalability that you get with public cloud, but your applications are architected in a way that makes the public cloud a non-starter. You're looking at private cloud solutions based on hyperconverged infrastructure, but you're concerned with the limits inherent in those technologies.
What do you do?

The 22nd International Cloud Expo | 1st DXWorld Expo has announced that its Call for Papers is open. Cloud Expo | DXWorld Expo, to be held June 5-7, 2018, at the Javits Center in New York, NY, brings together Cloud Computing, Digital Transformation, Big Data, Internet of Things, DevOps, Machine Learning and WebRTC to one location. With cloud computing driving a higher percentage of enterprise IT budgets every year, it becomes increasingly important to plant your flag in this fast-expanding business opportunity. Submit your speaking proposal today!

The past few years have brought a sea change in the way applications are architected, developed, and consumed—increasing both the complexity of testing and the business impact of software failures. How can software testing professionals keep pace with modern application delivery, given the trends that impact both architectures (cloud, microservices, and APIs) and processes (DevOps, agile, and continuous delivery)? This is where continuous testing comes in. D

In his Opening Keynote at 21st Cloud Expo, John Considine, General Manager of IBM Cloud Infrastructure, led attendees through the exciting evolution of the cloud. He looked at this major disruption from the perspective of technology, business models, and what this means for enterprises of all sizes. John Considine is General Manager of Cloud Infrastructure Services at IBM. In that role he is responsible for leading IBM’s public cloud infrastructure including strategy, development, and offering management. To date, IBM has launched more than 50 cloud data centers that span the globe. He has been building advanced technology, delivering “as a service” solutions, and managing infrastructure services for the past 20 years.

Digital transformation is about embracing digital technologies into a company's culture to better connect with its customers, automate processes, create better tools, enter new markets, etc. Such a transformation requires continuous orchestration across teams and an environment based on open collaboration and daily experiments.
In his session at 21st Cloud Expo, Alex Casalboni, Technical (Cloud) Evangelist at Cloud Academy, explored and discussed the most urgent unsolved challenges to achieve full cloud literacy in the enterprise world.

identify the sources of event storms and performance anomalies will require automated, real-time root-cause analysis.
I think Enterprise Management Associates said it well:
“The data and metrics collected at instrumentation points across the application ecosystem are essential to performance monitoring and root cause analysis.
However, analytics capable of transforming data and metrics into an application-focused report or dashboards are what separates actual application monitoring from relat...

One problem that all developers and companies struggle with is trying to decide if they should "build it" or "buy it". Software developers love to build things. That is what we do! Their natural reaction tends to lean towards building things. We are also always up for a new challenge.
There are very good reasons for building or buying software. There are also good reasons to use open source projects, which is a third option.

In his session at 21st Cloud Expo, Carl J. Levine, Senior Technical Evangelist for NS1, will objectively discuss how DNS is used to solve Digital Transformation challenges in large SaaS applications, CDNs, AdTech platforms, and other demanding use cases. Carl J. Levine is the Senior Technical Evangelist for NS1. A veteran of the Internet Infrastructure space, he has over a decade of experience with startups, networking protocols and Internet infrastructure, combined with the unique ability to it...

These days, no matter what task you’re trying to accomplish within your online properties, chances are there’s at least one cloud solution that provides it. However, with so much of our personal and business data living now online, there’s perhaps no functionality more important than cloud security. With cyber attacks more prevalent than ever, it’s imperative that organizations – regardless of their size and scope – protect both themselves and their clients from nefarious individuals who prey on...

DevOps teams have more on their plate than ever. As infrastructure needs grow, so does the time required to ensure that everything's running smoothly. This makes automation crucial - especially in the server and network monitoring world. Server monitoring tools can save teams time by automating server management and providing real-time performance updates.
As budgets reset for the New Year, there is no better time to implement a new server monitoring tool (or re-evaluate your current solution)....

The benefits of automation are well documented; it increases productivity, cuts cost and minimizes errors. It eliminates repetitive manual tasks, freeing us up to be more innovative. By that logic, surely, we should automate everything possible, right? So, is attempting to automate everything a sensible - even feasible - goal? In a word: no.
Consider this your short guide as to what to automate and what not to automate.

Cavirin Systems has just announced C2, a SaaS offering designed to bring continuous security assessment and remediation to hybrid environments, containers, and data centers. Cavirin C2 is deployed within Amazon Web Services (AWS) and features a flexible licensing model for easy scalability and clear pay-as-you-go pricing.
Although native to AWS, it also supports assessment and remediation of virtual or container instances within Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform (GCP), or on-premise. By dr...

Let's do a visualization exercise. Imagine it's December 31, 2018, and you're ringing in the New Year with your friends and family. You think back on everything that you accomplished in the last year: your company's revenue is through the roof thanks to the success of your product, and you were promoted to Lead Developer. 2019 is poised to be an even bigger year for your company because you have the tools and insight to scale as quickly as demand requires. You're a happy human, and it's not just...

"Opsani helps the enterprise adopt containers, help them move their infrastructure into this modern world of DevOps, accelerate the delivery of new features into production, and really get them going on the container path," explained Ross Schibler, CEO of Opsani, and Peter Nickolov, CTO of Opsani, in this SYS-CON.tv interview at DevOps Summit at 21st Cloud Expo, held Oct 31 – Nov 2, 2017, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA.

It’s “time to move on from DevOps and continuous delivery.”
This was the provocative title of a recent article in ZDNet, in which Kelsey Hightower, staff developer advocate at Google Cloud Platform, suggested that “software shops should have put these concepts into action years ago.”
Reading articles like this or listening to talks at most DevOps conferences might make you think that we’re entering a post-DevOps world. But vast numbers of organizations still struggle to start and drive transfo...

The nature of test environments is inherently temporary—you set up an environment, run through an automated test suite, and then tear down the environment. If you can reduce the cycle time for this process down to hours or minutes, then you may be able to cut your test environment budgets considerably.
The impact of cloud adoption on test environments is a valuable advancement in both cost savings and agility. The on-demand model takes advantage of public cloud APIs requiring only payment for t...

Digital experience monitoring plays a vital role in the ecommerce economy. The industry is booming with millions of websites selling everything imaginable. Online stores are expected to be super fast and easy to navigate; users are quick to assess website performance and if said perceived performance is below expectations, they will quickly move on to competitor’s website.

The question before companies today is not whether to become intelligent, it’s a question of how and how fast. The key is to adopt and deploy an intelligent application strategy while simultaneously preparing to scale that intelligence. In her session at 21st Cloud Expo, Sangeeta Chakraborty, Chief Customer Officer at Ayasdi, provided a tactical framework to become a truly intelligent enterprise, including how to identify the right applications for AI, how to build a Center of Excellence to oper...

While we understand Agile as a means to accelerate innovation, manage uncertainty and cope with ambiguity, many are inclined to think that it conflicts with the objectives of traditional engineering projects, such as building a highway, skyscraper or power plant. These are plan-driven and predictive projects that seek to avoid any uncertainty. This type of thinking, however, is short-sighted.
Agile approaches are valuable in controlling uncertainty because they constrain the complexity that ste...

The end of the year is a time for reflection. It’s when most of us are looking back at the choices, accomplishments, and mistakes of the year prior and setting goals to improve the following year. It’s also when businesses analyze the year’s trends and behaviors to determine necessary strategic changes to be made; however, if you aren’t analyzing the right metrics, such reflection is a useless effort.
Below is an excerpt from an article provided by Elad Rave, founder and CTO of Teridion, explai...

For over ten years, DevOps has been taking the world by storm. It has made organizations step back, evaluate their processes and implement enterprise-wide cultural and infrastructural change. Vendors have followed suite, introducing an abundance of continuous delivery tools to facilitate this step-change. L.P Hartley famously quipped, ‘The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there' - words which resound more than ever as we more further into the digital age.

We just came off of a review of a product that handles both containers and virtual machines in the same interface. Under the covers, implementation of containers defaults to LXC, though recently Docker support was added.
When reading online, or searching for information, increasingly we see “Container Management” products listed as competitors to Docker, when in reality things like Rocket, LXC/LXD, and Virtualization are Dockers competitors.
After doing some looking around, we have decided tha...

Coca-Cola’s Google powered digital signage system lays the groundwork for a more valuable connection between Coke and its customers. Digital signs pair software with high-resolution displays so that a message can be changed instantly based on what the operator wants to communicate or sell. In their Day 3 Keynote at 21st Cloud Expo, Greg Chambers, Global Group Director, Digital Innovation, Coca-Cola, and Vidya Nagarajan, a Senior Product Manager at Google, discussed how from store operations and ...

A strange thing is happening along the way to the Internet of Things, namely far too many devices to work with and manage. It has become clear that we'll need much higher efficiency user experiences that can allow us to more easily and scalably work with the thousands of devices that will soon be in each of our lives. Enter the conversational interface revolution, combining bots we can literally talk with, gesture to, and even direct with our thoughts, with embedded artificial intelligence, whic...

While having a reliable monitoring solution for your application is important, being able to parametrize and configure thresholds and alerting is even more critical.
No matter what kind of market your business is in, your web applications have seasonal patterns. For example, the load of a conventional airline ticketing system fluctuates heavily over the hours of the day, the day of the week, the month, and eventually a particular day of the year. Think about the travel difference between New ...

The widespread success of cloud computing is driving the DevOps revolution in enterprise IT. Now as never before, development teams must communicate and collaborate in a dynamic, 24/7/365 environment. There is no time to wait for long development cycles that produce software that is obsolete at launch. DevOps may be disruptive, but it is essential.

Cloud computing budgets worldwide are reaching into the hundreds of billions of dollars, and no organization can survive long without some sort of cloud migration strategy. Each month brings new announcements, use cases, and success stories.